Six years after his death, Patrick Lichfield's remarkable images of the Royal
family's private world are the focus of a new book and exhibition

Six years after Patrick Lichfield died of a stroke at the age of 66, his considerable legacy as a photographer is coming back into focus, with a major new retrospective (curated by the art historian Martin Harrison, who has also edited a forthcoming book of his work).

Of course, the 5th Earl of Lichfield had been famous for several decades before his death in 2005; but the fairytale of his life – the Queen's first cousin once removed, handsome Old Harrovian and Grenadier Guard turned Swinging Sixties snapper – skewed a more considered view of his career. Almost as famous for his string of glamorous girlfriends as for his portraits of the Royal family, Lichfield was a stalwart of the gossip columns and a Burberry model long before Kate Moss came along.

Yet after the froth has subsided – the stories of jet-setting between grouse moor and Mustique; the affairs with Britt Ekland, Jane Seymour and countless others who succumbed to his fabled seductive charms – Lichfield's lasting achievements are clear.

He was among the best of his generation of photographers (including his friend David Bailey and his kinsman by marriage, Lord Snowdon), creating some of the most enduring images of the eras he inhabited. Often unfairly cast as lacking depth – a deb's delight trading on his society connections – Lichfield was as adept at capturing the face of a London tramp as the St Tropez wedding of Mick and Bianca Jagger in 1971 (though it is a measure of his social credentials that he also gave away the bride that day).

His iconic portrait of Paul and Talitha Getty on their Marrakesh rooftop in 1969 went on to inspire myriad fashion collections – and remains the distillation of a certain kind of haute-bohemian glamour before it collapsed into drug addiction and overdose.

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But it is Lichfield's private, apparently spontaneous photographs of the Royal family that are now revealed to provide an even more remarkable insight into what might otherwise remain a closed way of life.

Take, for example, his pictures of the Queen at Balmoral in September 1971. His family connection came via his mother (née Anne Bowes-Lyon, a niece of the Queen Mother, who married Prince Georg of Denmark after her divorce from Lichfield's father in 1948); which did not grant him automatic access, but perhaps made him more alert to the mood and surroundings of his subject matter.

According to Lichfield's own account of the Scottish shoot in his memoir, 'the secret of candid photography is to Be Prepared. I made discreet enquiries as to the usual daily routine at the Castle, discovered which doors, which rooms, which lochs and woods and burns were particular favourites, reconnoitred the terrain for hidden obstacles and opportunities, and kept an eye firmly open to every changing nuance of the light (which, in north-east Scotland in late summer, can be even more unpredictable than the weather).'

The results are beautifully subtle: the Queen in the Balmoral stable yard (her silk print headscarf knotted with characteristic aplomb, and worn, as always, on her daily riding expeditions, instead of a hard hat), she leaning close to one of her much-loved horses, as if whispering in affection even as the animal appears to be bowing down before her.

The sartorial details of the picture are as telling as any that Lichfield produced for Vogue – more so, possibly, when you see Her Majesty's well-polished stout shoes and traditional tweeds, which nevertheless look positively chic four decades on (and every bit as influential for subsequent designers, including Miuccia Prada, as Talitha Getty was to Yves Saint Laurent).

The Queen's affection for animals is apparent in another of Lichfield's portfolio from the same Balmoral weekend; surrounded by four of her black Labradors, one of them on back legs, paws embracing her Royal Stewart kilt, she caresses the dog's head with tenderness. In the background, bicycles are propped up against the castle wall, evidence of a domestic family outing, while a smaller dog (one of the Queen's favourite breeds, the dorgi; half corgi, half dachshund) looks on, entirely calm in a manner that very few people are when in the presence of the Monarch.

Then there's the similarly unposed split-second that Lichfield catches, as the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh dance at the annual Ghillies' Ball (the Queen Mother, like her daughter, also identifiable by her tiara and tartan, as she stands to the right of the circle). The royals are taking part in a set of Highland reels, alongside their estate and castle staff, for this is a night when the most junior gamekeepers are invited to the ball.

Ten years on Lichfield was close at hand again, this time at Buckingham Palace, capturing Princess Diana on her wedding day, as she leant down to comfort one of her bridesmaids, Clementine Hambro; the Queen in turquoise blue behind them, concerned mother to the groom, rather than head of state.

Other notable inclusions in Martin Harrison's selection are of the Queen aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia in March 1972; one showing her studying a red box of official papers, her Private Secretary, Sir Martin Charteris, at her side. The lateness of the hour is suggested by the drawn curtains and her evening gown; the chintz furnishings adding a touch of domesticity to the scene of diligent hard work.

In contrast, there is a sun-drenched daylight shot of the Queen laughing from the side of the yacht; as Lichfield was to reveal in his memoir, the cause of her merriment was the photographer himself, when he fell into a makeshift swimming-pool. 'She seemed to be completely unaware of the fact that I'd taken the basic precaution of packing my Nykonos, a small and, as the subsequent pictures prove, undeniably waterproof camera.'

Lichfield's ability to act as court jester had already proved crucial to his masterly pictures of the elusive Duke and Duchess of Windsor at home in September 1967. The commission was his first from Diana Vreeland, by then the editor of American Vogue, who had summoned him to the Hotel de Crillon in Paris, where a cryptic question awaited the photographer, written on a single piece of Vogue-headed notepaper within an envelope bearing his name.

'Who,' asked Vreeland, 'is the best-dressed man in the world?' Lichfield's answer – the Duke of Windsor – proved to be what Vreeland required, and she dispatched him to Le Moulin de la Tuilerie, the Windsors' country house just south of Paris. The Duke, recalled Lichfield, 'greeted me very politely, spent a few minutes speculating as to whether we were related and, having read somewhere that I was a fellow ex-Grenadier, insisted that we practise our sword drill.'

When the Earl finally managed to get the Duke and Duchess to pose for him, 'desperate to raise a smile, and lacking a ladder to fall off, I put my foot through a cane garden chair instead, and guaranteed myself at least one good shot.' As it turned out, he got more than one; the picture of the Duke playing cards, while the Duchess hovers behind, eerie as a still from a Hitchcock film, Wallis as Mrs Danvers; yet there is also pathos in the snaps of the abdicated king demonstrating how to tie an authentic Windsor knot, and reflected in his bathroom mirror, arranging his scarf with dandyish precision.

The counterpoint to these portraits of a landless exile and his American wife might, perhaps, be seen in two contrasting pictures of the Queen and her mother, as quintessential Englishwomen. The first is of the Queen Mother in conversation with the poet John Betjeman at a Kent wedding in June 1968, framed by strawberries, roses and champagne; her ample lime-green dress and white-flower trimmed hat the antithesis of Wallis Simpson's starved-to-perfection chic, yet all the more charming for that.

Second, Lichfield's shot of the Queen on her way to the State Opening of Parliament in November 1971, her smile as radiant as her diamond tiara, glamorous within the dark surround of a ceremonial carriage, yet somehow at the heart of her nation.

Photographs provide us with an intrinsic and privileged access to memory,' observes Martin Harrison, while also acknowledging that 'nothing about Lichfield is as it appears on the surface'. That his life seemed charmed is undeniable – his friend and model Joanna Lumley has described Lichfield's presence as like 'a light going on, or a champagne cork popping' – but he was no less prone to darkness than the rest of us.

His marriage to Lady Leonora Grosvenor (sister of the Duke of Westminster, and mother of Lichfield's son and two daughters) was not happy ever after, although he found peace with his long-term partner, Lady Annunziata Asquith. The early death of his father (at the age of 44, as a consequence of an allergic reaction to a bee sting) hastened the decline of the family's ancestral home, Shugborough in Staffordshire, which was eventually vested in the National Trust.

Patrick and his sister, Elizabeth, were, however, allowed to retain a wing of the house, and it was here that he composed a coda to his autobiography (aptly entitled Not the Whole Truth) in 1986. How, he wondered, would he arrange the view from his windows, to crop out the thistles in the background?

As with his photographs, he admitted, so too his life must be composed and delicately retouched 'to keep things neat'; while his painful divorce, 'like the thistles, must remain, as far as I'm concerned, outside the frame' .

But within the frame, Patrick Lichfield's glorious pictures remain glowing; undimmed, luminous, keepsakes to cherish forever, even as the epochs they epitomise slowly fade.